The term “esthetic” comes from greek as well, the word “aesthesis”- sensorial perception- and includes more than just the visual perception: it stands for a global perception with all given senses, encompassing the impression the perceived leaves on the body. In the original meaning of the concept, tactile and visual perception constitutes a whole, together with hearing and feeling. Even scent is part of the aesthesis, as well discernment, part of the esthetic experience. If we think to something very familiar to the medical world, we might refer to the “anaesthesia”, that is simply the blocking of the body sensorial perception which might be total, inducing consciousness or local. As an oxymoron, anaesthesia seems quite to block the aesthesis, the aesthetic experience. We are definitely grateful to a group of researchers and physicians in Boston, at the end on the nineteenth century which discover the useful of anaesthetic gas in surgery. There were not the first: probably, many centuries ago, anaesthetics herbs were used both for healing and for sacrifice. Calling in action the meaning of anesthesia, I thought to be powerful enough to explain deeply the roots of an aesthetic experience: something perceived by the whole body, and this something produces something good just by the fact of the engagement of our sensorial and logical system with the world around, the people around, the air around the Body.
Professor Semir Zeki from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at University College London in the United Kingdom, along with colleague Dr. Tomohiro Ishizu are the founders of Neuro Esthetics, therefore the interaction between brain and Beauty and Ugliness. They discovered that the medial orbito-frontal cortex, in human beings, what experts call the pleasure and reward centre of the brain, showed stronger activity in the brains of participants that listened to music or looked at a picture that they had already deemed beautiful. Zeki found, by examining MRI images of his subjects’ brains, that when people look at something they find beautiful, a portion in the front part of the brain called the medial orbito-frontal cortex “lights up” , that is, there’s increased blood flow in this area. He believes it’s a near-universal response to beauty. It really tells us that seeking beauty, puts us in the condition of “feeling good”, a universal thing and that, in some cases, there universal ways to get to it. The brain pleasure centre is rewarded with the neurotransmitter dopamine, a good one among the neurotransmitters, Zeki added that one thing that’s novel about his study, and this without any expectation, – is that beauty as perceived through the eyes (e.g., visual art), and beauty you receive through the ears (e.g., music) aren’t routed to different parts of the brain; they both “reward” the same place. The degree of activity in the medial orbito-frontal cortex correlates very strongly to the degree to which you find a thing attractive. He explained:
“The extent of activity in the medial frontal cortex is directly proportional to the declared intensity of beauty. So if you experience something as very beautiful on a scale of 1 to 10 and you give it a 10, then the activity is going to be stronger than if you experience it as a 1 out of 10.”
By contrast, Zeki said, he found that when people see something that’s aesthetically displeasing – something they find ugly – it lights up a completely different part of the brain:
“It is another region of the brain, called the amygdyla, which is also active when you look at frightening stimuli, also active with fear and anger, as if the body is being mobilized, or prepared, or planning some kind of motor action to avoid what is ugly.”
Now the challenge is to find out what are the objects stimulating the release of dopamine or the amygdala have in common to foster these common patterns in the brain (Toward A Brain-Based Theory of Beauty Tomohiro Ishizu, Semir Zeki, Plos One, Published: July 6, 2011).
